Cybersecurity Giants Vie for Control Plane Dominance

The cybersecurity landscape is evolving rapidly as enterprises shift from protecting their infrastructure to controlling how it behaves. This transformation is evident in the strategies adopted by major players like Palo Alto Networks and Cisco, which are positioning themselves as control planes for the enterprise.

Palo Alto Networks has been at the forefront of this change with its acquisition spree worth over $35 billion. The company's focus on platformization, consolidating fragmented security functions into a common platform, is aimed at applying security and policy across much of the enterprise. However, Palo Alto's technical support has faced criticism, with customers complaining about inexperienced first-line engineers, scripted troubleshooting, and slow escalation.

Cisco, on the other hand, is heading towards the same destination from the opposite direction. By combining networking with identity, observability, Splunk, and increasingly autonomous security, Cisco is building a comprehensive platform that enables enterprises to control their infrastructure.